As you may have heard, graphene is awesome. This single layer of carbon atoms arranged as a honeycomb crystal lattice is both the thinnest material we’ve ever discovered and the strongest one compared to a similar thickness of anything else (even old Nokia phones). It conducts both heat and electricity better than anything else yet measured, and is both the stiffest and yet the most ductile. It’s for these reasons graphene experiments earned Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. Now a team at the University of Manchester led by Andre Geim and Rahul Nair has found another incredible property of graphene: it can be made superpermeable to water vapor while locking in everything else.

For their experiment, the team build a laminate out of sheets of graphene oxide. The laminate was much thinner than a human hair but was still very strong and flexible. The laminate was used to seal a metal container; then they studied which gases were able to escape the container. Not even tiny helium molecules escaped, and yet water vapor passed through the laminate at the same rate as water vapor escaped an uncovered metal container. Rahul Nair offered an explanation I’ll pretend I understand:

“Graphene oxide sheets arrange in such a way that between them there is room for exactly one layer of water molecules. They arrange themselves in one molecule thick sheets of ice which slide along the graphene surface with practically no friction. If another atom or molecule tries the same trick, it finds that graphene capillaries either shrink in low humidity or get clogged with water molecules.” [Manchester]

*puffs pipe, adjusts cravat* Yes. Quite. What he said. Indeed.

Andre Geim added, “Helium gas is hard to stop. It slowly leaks even through a millimetre-thick window glass but our ultra-thin films completely block it. At the same time, water evaporates through them unimpeded. Materials cannot behave any stranger. [...] The properties are so unusual that it is hard to imagine that they cannot find some use in the design of filtration, separation or barrier membranes and for selective removal of water.”

The researchers may have already found one prize-worthy use for the laminate: making vodka stronger. Nair said, “Just for a laugh, we sealed a bottle of vodka with our membranes and found that the distilled solution became stronger and stronger with time. Neither of us drinks vodka but it was great fun to do the experiment.” You know what would be even more fun? Drinking that vodka.

There’s a retail chain for educational toys in the UK called “The Early Learning Centre” which I pronounce “sent-ray” while drinking Earl Gray with my pinky out because I’m fancy/illiterate. Game developer Ross Mills wrote an awesomely geeky letter to the chain about their marketing of Anakin Skywalker toys. The full letter (and their equally hilarious and well-reasoned response) are after the jump but here’s the short version: Mills thought Anakin shouldn’t be portrayed in a positive light in their toy advertising and wrote a tongue-in-cheek email explaining Anakin’s many crimes. A representative from The Early Learning Centre wrote back an equally light-hearted but well-researched rebuttal. And thus we felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in bemusement and were suddenly guffawing.

First, the letter Mills sent to the company:
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Eben Upton, the executive director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, recently stood in front of a Skyrim map while making a video announcing the auction of the first ten Raspberry Pi computers. These computers are eventually going to retail for $25 and are the Model B boards which include a 700MHz ARM11 processor and 256MB of SDRAM on a board the size of a credit card (more specs here).

So how much are these $25 computers selling for at auction? Just a tad more than $25. The first one listed has already been bid up to £1,750.00 (~$2,700 USD) as of this writing. The second is £850 (~$1,300 USD), the third is £623 (~$970 USD), and the fourth is £565 (~$880 USD). FIVE GOLDEN RINGS . . . could easily be purchased with the same amount of money.

The auction winners get a “$25 computer” with a serial number of ten or lower, along with a certificate of authenticity, a USB power supply, an SD card pre-loaded with Linux (probably Debian), and a sizable tax deduction if UK registered charities are tax deductible where they live. You also get the bragging rights of saying you paid thousands of dollars for a 700 MHz computer, just like a K Street wonk from 1999 boasting about his new Pentium laptop into a Nokia cellphone you could bludgeon someone to death with.

The $25 Raspberry Pi computer (which can run Quake III) is still on track for production next year, and they’ve released pictures (after the break) of their first batch of beta devices. The only difference between the boards seen above — which are the exact same length and width as a credit card — and the finished product is that the ones above have their GPIO pins soldered on to aid in testing them. I’m going to pretend I understand what GPIO pins do because journalism.

The computer plugs into any TV with an HDMI output and has enough graphics power to display 1080p videos. It has a 700MHz ARM11 processor and 128MB of SDRAM (fuller specs here). SAI interviewed Eben Upton, executive director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and found out the foundation plans on remaining a not-for-profit endeavor and open-sourcing the computer so that any company can mass produce the cheap computers for the developing world and for schools. They estimate they have an upper limit of around 100,000 computers they’d be able to produce in a year (in batches of 10,000), so they want others to be able to produce more of them if needed.

Upton also said the multimedia performance of the computer is “substantially better” than the Tegra 3 chip (used in smartphones) and that the only smartphone with a performance equal to the $25 computer is the Samsung Galaxy S II, which costs just a tad bit more than $25. Just a smidge.

[Sources: Raspberry Pi Foundation (1, 2), SAI]

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A few weeks ago David Yates (director on the last four Harry Potter films) said he was working with Jane Tranter of BBC Worldwide to bring a Doctor Who franchise to theaters which would “start from scratch”. Current head writer and executive producer of Doctor Who Steven Moffat responded to the news by tweeting, “Announcing my personal moonshot, starting from scratch. No money, no plan, no help from NASA. But I know where the moon is; I’ve seen it.”

Since then there hasn’t been an update, until Moffat tweeted this weekend:

He followed up by tweeting: “David Yates, great director, was speaking off the cuff, on a red carpet. You’ve seen the rubbish I talk when I’m cornered.” The Variety article didn’t sound like a hurried statement from a red carpet, however. I’m still going to side with Moffat because I want to.

In other Who news, CBM and Blastr have ten promo pictures from this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special, two of which are after the jump and I promise I only defaced one of them.

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Not pictured: Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner on lightcycles.

The $25 Raspberry Pi computer (which can run Quake III) is still on track for wide release next year. The ARM GNU/Linux box is intended to affordably teach programming, and now they’ve released the Gerbers (visualization of the printed circuit board) for us to gawk at. It’s going to be a 6-layer PCB, and it’s designed to be the same exact size as a credit card (85.60mm x 53.98mm). Along with the ports and the BCM2835 chip in the center, this $25 computer should be about the thickness of a deck of cards, maybe less. Holy crap this thing is tiny and cheap. Now consider that it’s probably going to have a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128MB of SDRAM, and enough graphics power to display 1080p videos (fuller specs here). Is this real life?

The picture to the right should give a better idea of the size the computer will be. Raspi explains:

One of our forum members has mocked up a 1:1 scale card model of the board, and put it next to a quarter for scale, with some components like those you’ll see on the real board [a stacked USB port and a cat5 connector] laid on top.

So that’s a cool business card, but I bet it doesn’t run Crysis.